Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber
Assistant Professor, Anthropology
City College of New York
Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the Center for Worker Education
isilber@ccny.cuny.edu
(212) 925-9925 ext. 208
City College of New York Center for Worker Education
25 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10004
Lotti Silber’s work explores postwar processes in one of El Salvador's former warzones and a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation. She documents what she terms the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement, aftermaths that have produced postwar deception and disillusionment. Her book, Revolutionaries on the Postwar Highway: Disillusionment in El Salvador (under contract with Rutgers University Press) unmasks how community members are asked contradictorily and in different contexts to relinquish their identities as “revolutionaries” and to develop a new sense of themselves as productive yet marginal postwar citizens via the same rubric of “participation” that fueled their revolutionary action. Specifically, she traces the lives of the rank and file members of this historic struggle for justice and reconstruction, following community members along their journey from revolutionary activists to postwar development recipients and ambivalent grassroots actors, to in many cases now undocumented migrants. It is this most recent shift to migration, only under the "transition to democracy" that she finds most compelling and that she theorizes as one of obligation.
Her work has been published in scholarly journals and peer-reviewed volumes. Articles and chapters include:
Silber, Irina Carlota. “Local Capacity Building in ‘Dysfunctional’ Times: Internationals, Revolutionaries and Activism in Postwar El Salvador.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 35/3&4 (2007): 163-183.
Silber, Irina Carlota. “Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador.” Gender & History 16/3 (2004): 561-587.
Silber, Irina Carlota. “Commemorating the Past in Postwar El Salvador.” In Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space, eds. Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Knauer. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). pp. 211-231.
Silber, Irina Carlota. “Not Revolutionary Enough?: Community Rebuilding in Postwar Chalatenango.” In Landscapes of Struggle: Politics, Society and Community in El Salvador, eds. A. Lauria-Santiago and L. Binford. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). pp. 587-594.
Before joining the faculty at the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Silber received several postdoctoral fellowships, and research support. These include:
Rockefeller Fellowship, Institute on Violence and Survival, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, University of Virginia.
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. “Utopia, Violence, Resistance: Remaking and Unmaking Humanity.”
Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Inter-American Foundation.
Dissertation Fellowship.Organization of American States.
She has also received institutional support from CUNY, through the PSC-Cuny awards program and the Faculty Fellowship Publication Program.
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Room 5419 The Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10016 (212) 817-8438 clacls@gc.cuny.edu |
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